Even New Zealand is full of praises about this Taiwanese team

🏡 In the middle of this month, I was invited to a presentation conducted jointly by the “Water Box” team, one of the top 10 teams in this year’s Presidential Hackathon, and New Zealand’s Lightning Lab to learn how they have managed in just one week to review and reinforce the innovative application scenario of Water Box and its possible business models with the assistance of two mentors from New Zealand.

🇳🇿 The presentation was also attended by representatives from the New Zealand Commercial and Industrial Office. The mentors and senior diplomats were extravagant in their praises of the achievement of the Water Box team.

🌾 Members of the Water Box team come from the National Taipei University of Science and Technology, Teng-Mao Tech Corporation, Chen Yang Environmental Technologist Office, Pegatrono Corporation, Germany’s Ge-Komm Corporation and Taiwan’s ECOCEO Open Community. They have extrapolated the concept and practice of the internationally renowned successful citizen technology program “Air Box” to create a reasonably cost and widely deployable Water Box. In the future, the Water Box will automatically collect data such as water quality, water volume and the changing cycle of the hydrological environment. Hopefully, this device will strengthen the prediction, prevention and management of different pollution sources and reduce the negative impact on agricultural water use.

💯 Furthermore, there is another important water-related innovation in Taiwan: “Mountain River Event Book”, the recent winner of NTD 1 million prize from the Civil IoT Data Application Competition.

🏞️ The Mountain and River Event Book adheres to the spirit of open source and self-creation. It integrates open data such as hydrology, climate and hydrology in the Civil IoT network. Using visualization to display the dynamics of water status across Taiwan, it allows anyone in the community who cares about changes in water levels to query the rainfall, water level, tidal level and pumping station operational status in various regions, and use satellite information and other information sources to carry out preliminary analysis in order to understand the circumstances and causes of flooding events.

🌏 Whether it is in the Presidential Hackathon or the Civil IoT Data Application Competition, I believe we have found many experts in the community. Government resources are limited, while civil power is limitless. Solving specific social problems and promoting global sustainable development through citizen-cooperative data governance partnerships is a precious innovation in itself and deserves to be praised by the people of Taiwan.